mud shark

Mud shark is a nickname for the spiny dogfish or burbot that originated with Alaskan fishermen in the 1930s. It’s a critter eaten around the world, sometimes in fish and chips.

The mud shark is part of rock ‘n’ roll history, too. Frank Zappa’s 1971 song “The Mud Shark” is an account of a groupie who allegedly did some freaky sex stuff with a mud shark in a Led Zepplin roadie’s Seattle hotel room.

Unfortunately by 1998, things had turned ugly for our finned friend the mud shark, as white supremacist groups started using the term to describe white women who sleep with black men.

Mud shark disparages such women as “bottom feeders,” like actual mud sharks. If you’d like a side of sexism with that, mud sharks are generally described as unattractive, overweight, and suffering from low self-esteem and daddy issues. The word mud additionally smears skin color and shark, a person on the prowl.  

Mud shark was entered on Urban Dictionary by 2002 and had emerged as a name for interracial porn featuring white women and black men. By 2008, it had become a fairly common racial slur online, spreading with the rise of alt-right communities who see mud sharks as “race traitors” who are contributing to “white genocide” by having biracial children. In 2015, several Florida police officers lost their jobs over racist emails and texts containing the slur, and in 2017, a Connecticut cop was suspended without pay for using it on Facebook.